The blocking and assertive harassing last Wednesday night of former president of the Supreme Court Aharon Barak reminded us that the beneath-the-surface bubbling of inter-camp taunting, baiting, and derisive insulting is still very much with us.
Right-wing street activists, Mordechai David, Hadar Muchtar, and Roi Star, have entered the ring these past few months in copycat actions, much to the chagrin of leftist politicians and public figures now suffering what was done to those supporting the government for the past few years.
While many, on both sides of the divide, surely felt uneasy at the sight of 89-year-old Barak blocked from leaving a parking lot and being berated mercilessly, it would be unfair not to recall the toddler in his mother’s car, blocked on Jerusalem’s Begin Road by the Kaplan Street protestors with one breaking a windshield on July 24, 2023. Some might even recall demonstrators blocking MK Tally Gotliv’s apartment door at 6 a.m. on February 20, 2023, with her autistic child inside.
Others will remember Yair Golan outside a Tel Aviv hair salon on March 1, 2023, calling on his “troops” to assemble in larger numbers to more effectively lay siege to Sara Netanyahu, who was inside. The list of such outrageous events of the Kaplan Crowd targeting persons instead of policies and causing great bother and interference with many thousands of non-related actors, including patients in ambulances, is long.
Barak, however, presents a different set of protest delineations. Not only is Barak quite elderly and held in esteem, by virtue of his long years on the bench, but, as his admirers posted on social media outlets, he’s a Holocaust survivor.
The warning was clear: he’s untouchable. Making that assertion, they assign a certain plane of moral virtue, in truth, an elitism, to some people, which, they claim, is rightfully theirs because of the role they fulfil in maintaining a just society.
Having read an insightful essay by Matt McInnis on a critical analysis of certain problems facing America’s political and cultural situation based on the thinking of French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel, born to a Jewish mother, Sarah-Claire Boas, I have recognized certain parallels and paradigms that I think could be applied to Israel’s current social conflict experiences.
Ever since the first Likud victory of Menachem Begin in 1977, the heirs to the Mapai/Histadrut hegemony that had its fingers in almost every sphere of Israel’s state structure, its political, economic, and cultural operations, have never forgiven their loss. They were the managing elite of Zionism’s product. They possessed and controlled the power of the state.
Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth wrote, continues to grow by its very nature; it “lives for its sake and for its fruits.” State rulers want power and the perks that come with it.
Using bureaucracies, nonprofits, and international bodies for power
Finding themselves out of government, they sought power by bunkering down in an alternative power structure, that of the courts, bureaucracies, nonprofits, representations in international bodies, the theater, and, of course, media networks, public and commercial. They set to work to restrain the whims of the many for the safety of the few.
For this displaced and now disgruntled class of Israelis, very much white, Ashkenazi, secular, and progressive, their foundational belief was that legitimacy does not flow from the people to their representatives but from vulnerable groups to the institutions that protect them. Facing an ideology that was ostracized in the 1930s and 1940s, when Ze’ev Jabotinsky was called a “fascist”, this class sought to reestablish its top-down control mechanisms.
The Mapai-Histadrut hegemony's collapse set in motion the current coalescence around the “independence” of our juristocracy and other entrenched governmental agencies, each being supported by NGOs, media actors, cultural artists, and academia. They assumed for themselves the role of the final arbiter responsible, as McInnis phrases it, “for rulemaking in all forms (cultural, bureaucratic, administrative).” It is they who claim the sole right to “define the moral horizon of…politics.”
The parties in opposition, in the Knesset, in the streets, in academia, and in the radio and television studios, are angry not only because they see a different agenda being achieved but because they are powerless. They demand to dictate what the common civic good is. As de Jouvenel terms it, they are fixated on a pathos of power.
As a result of that pathos, they develop a righteous fury. That allows them to block the offices of Kohelet but also to justify their criticism of the blocking of the vehicle of Aharon Barak. They are correct to bang Minister Avi Dichter on the head with a pole and to chase the underage children of Minister Amichai Chikli, and they can permit themselves to twist Hadar Muchtar’s fingers as we have seen on her TikTok clips.
Moreover, by portraying those of the Right as bad, they rationalize additional extensions of their power. The government can create the Army Radio, but it cannot close it. The Knesset can legislate laws, but then the Supreme Court is able to instruct them that they cannot act in accordance with those laws.
They have grabbed the reins of power to define the moral language. They then assert that our politics and its practitioners are corrupt and only the courts and the professional bureaucrats’ class can save society and democracy. To quote de Jouvenel, power is intoxicating, and although “the giant was already up and about: they do no more than furnish him with a terrible spirit.”
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.